flâneur

The Value of Art | The Excluded Riddle

gabrieldwu.com · 866 words · saved by 1 readers

I recently realized that I’ve been thinking about art – especially modern art – in the wrong way. Up until a few weeks ago, my biggest problem with modern art was that people try to extract too much meaning out of too little content. Can Rothko’s painting of two fuzzy rectangles really capture the depths of human emotion? This seems to violate some law of conservation of information. The way I saw it, you really only need a couple hundred bits (0s and 1s) to represent certain Rothko paintings1 – the same amount of information as a couple of sentences of English text2. Rothko's Number 14. Can the depths of human emotion really be evoked with the information contained in a couple of well-written sentences? Maybe, but I’ve always been skeptical. To me, it seemed that most of the meaning extracted from modern art pieces came from the critic themself as they somehow projected their own views on society/humanity/life onto the piece. This is not bad, it just means that the value resides less in the artwork and more in the critic. Put differently, I thought that most of the appeal of modern art was placebo. The desire to think that something is meaningful makes it feel meaningful. But then I visited Laurie Anderson’s exhibit The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. I was overcome with fear while walking through Salute, a dark hallway of red flags waved in unison by robotic arms set to ominous droning. I was struck with wonder and nostalgia in Four Talks, an entire room covered with cryptic graffiti holding four odd sculptures. I am quite confident that this fear, wonder, and nostalgia were not placebos. Experiencing this art evoked substantive emotions in my mind. Anderson's Salute and Four Talks. My photos do not do them justice. This is when I began to realize that I had been thinking about art in the wrong way. Instead of treating a piece of art as a mysterious capsule that carries intrinsic value for being “beautiful” or “meaningful,” I should treat it si

I recently realized that I’ve been thinking about art – especially modern art – in the wrong way. Up until a few weeks ago, my biggest problem with modern art was that people try to extract too much meaning out of too little content. Can Rothko’s painting of two fuzzy rectangles really capture the depths of human emotion? This seems to violate some law of conservation of information. The way I saw it, you really only need a couple hundred bits (0s and 1s) to represent certain Rothko paintings1 – the same amount of information as a couple of sentences of English text2. Rothko's Number 14.…

saved by

related reading